Mobile marketing is considered by advertisers as the next new channel to reach direct to the user by utilizing the core assets and characteristics of the mobile media: it being personal, “always on”, mobile and naturally forming groups of people who communicate actively with each other. These characteristics combined with social networks—based marketing approach of the Internet could form a very powerful base to execute marketing strategies.
In general, mobile marketing and advertising can be divided into the following four categories:                a) Mobile Marketing: The systematic planning, implementing and control of a mix of business activities intended to bring together buyers and sellers for the mutually advantageous exchange or transfer of products where the primary point of contact with the recipient is via their mobile device.        b) Mobile Advertising: The paid, public, non-personal announcement of a persuasive message by an identified sponsor; the non-personal presentation or promotion by a firm of its products to its existing and potential customers where such communication is delivered to a mobile phone or other mobile device. Examples of mobile advertising would include: Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Banner ads, Web page Banner ads, mobile search advertising, mobile video bumpers, and interstitial ads in on device portals.        c) Mobile Direct Marketing: Sales and promotion technique in which the promotional materials are delivered individually to potential customers via the potential customer's mobile phone or other mobile device. Examples of mobile direct marketing include the sending of Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Message Service (MMS) or WAP push messages, Bluetooth messaging, personalized WAP and Web page banner and other advertisements and other interrupt based marketing to mobile phones or other mobile devices.        d) Mobile customer relation management (CRM): Combination of all the above in a manner that establishes a long-term, engaging relationship between the customer and the promoting company.        
Today's mobile marketing is usually mostly based on push campaigns to opt-in recipient mobile number database, or pull campaigns that acquire mobile phone numbers from recipients. A popular method is direct advertisement done using text and picture messaging. As the mobile device is conceived very personal, it cannot be filled with junk advertisement, as people stop receiving advertisements, either by unsubscribing from the advertisement service or by blocking the advertisements with some technical mechanism. Thus, the receivers have either to opt-in to certain campaigns, or provide enough personal details for targeting the advertisements more precisely than in the traditional media. Using personal details makes the advertisements more compelling and more effective to the advertisement receiver, and may thus enable a higher number of advertisements to be sent to a single receiver without causing the receiver to consider the marketing information received via a mobile channel as a burden. Also the utilization of the capacity of the network is improved. On the other hand, the more individually the delivery of the marketing messages is targeted in the network, the more processing capacity is needed for selecting targets and scheduling the delivery and/or reserving network resources. The advertisement reservation and allocation may involve dozens or hundreds of parameters that can be freely selected on an advertisement basis, which may easily lead to a reservation method that cannot effectively reserve the advertisement receivers and achieve a full booking in the utilization of mobile network resources point of view. The reservation is also time-constrained challenge, as there is only a short period of time (e.g. few hours) available in a day to run the reservation, which imposes further requirements for the processing/computing capacity. The number of advertisement receivers (i.e. recipients) may be extremely high (e.g. hundreds of thousands or millions of recipients). If a reservation method using a limited processing capacity is optimized to provide a high accuracy and guarantee a maximum number of messages sent in a network per day, the processing is easily be too slow for such a high number of advertisement receivers and the time available for processing. On the other hand, if a reservation method using a limited processing capacity is optimized for the speed of processing, a high number of advertisement receivers can be processed with the time available for processing, but the accuracy is reduced, i.e. the customers may receive wrong type of or too many messages and/or the network resources may not be used efficiently in terms of a number of messages sent in a network per day.